In the modern era, businesses must process large volumes of transactions quickly and effectively. Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) systems are a solution, built to handle vast numbers of straightforward and quick transactions like online banking, retail sales, and order entry. Despite their intended usage, traditional OLTP systems are often hampered by write contention which occurs when several transactions try to change the same data at the same time. These contentions can result in delays and decrease performance, posing considerable challenges for banking, trading, and inventory management sectors.
Existing solutions such as general-purpose databases have tried to manage OLTP workloads, but they frequently fall short. They struggle under the high demands of swift transaction processing and may require costly hardware and complicated configurations to keep performance levels acceptable.
A new solution known as TigerBeetle is designed to address these specific challenges. It reconsiders the design of distributed databases, concentrating on the demands of OLTP workloads. By redesigning storage engines and consensus protocols, TigerBeetle minimizes write contention and maximizes performance. It notably carries a built-in schema for debit and credit transactions, making it highly suitable for financial applications.
TigerBeetle encompasses a spectrum of potent features. For instance, it can process transactions up to 1000 times faster than general-purpose databases resulting in high OLTP performance. It offers the strict serializability to guarantee financial consistency without depending on clock synchronization. It can stand up to local storage faults using global redundancy and provides automated failover with the VSR consensus protocol for fault tolerance.
TigerBeetle is handling over 100 billion transactions per cluster, at a fraction of traditional systems’ cost, offering cost-efficiency and scalability. It has several other features including deterministic testing, double-entry accounting, linked events, net balance limits, chart of accounts connectivity, multi-tenant currencies, two-phase transfers, and inflight balances management.
In conclusion, TigerBeetle provides a strong and efficient solution for enterprises needing to manage large-scale transaction processing. Its specialized design, superior speeds, and cost-efficiency make it a desirable option for a variety of industries, ranging from core banking to gaming live operations. TigerBeetle essentially serves as a distributed financial transactions database designed for safety and performance-critical missions to power Online Transaction Processing (OLTP).
